William Stafford's new book, A Glass Face in the Rain, contains six introductory poems set in italic type, one standing at the beginning of each individual section and one placed at the very start of the book. The best actual introduction to the volume, however, may be found in the concluding stanza of the first "real" poem in the book, "Tuned in Late One Night":

             Now I am fading, with this ambition:
             to read with my brights full on,
             to write on a clear glass typewriter,
             to listen with sympathy,
             to speak like a child.

The passage recognizes the position of the writer—as an aging man, he is "fading," able to see his own death in the not so distant future—and indicates his desires as a poet: he wishes to confront the truth without blinking and to express it exactly as he sees it; he wishes...